First published in 1953, “To the Actor: On the Technique of Acting” is the famous and influential guide to acting by Russian-American actor, director, and teacher Michael Chekhov. Born in Saint Petersburg in 1891 and the nephew of Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Michael Chekhov studied acting from the famed theater director Konstantin Stanislavski at the First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre and was considered by Stanislavski to be his most brilliant student. While Chekhov was at first ...

Michael Chekhov's classic work To the Actor has been revised and expanded by Mala Powers to explain, clearly and concisely, the essential techniques for every actor from developing a character to strengthen awareness.Chekhov's simple and practical method – successfully used by professional actors all over the world – trains the actor's imagination and body to fulfill its potential.To the Actor includes a previously unpublished chapter on 'Psychological Ges...

In the early 1930s, during his first years of exile and 20 years before the publication of his seminal work To the Actor, Michael Chekhov made his first incursion into the challenging task of writing about an actor's experience and his vision of the craft.This important, though largely forgotten, work (the so-called 'Paris Manuscript') was handwritten in German and in it we find Chekhov laying the groundwork for the canon of exercises and practices that, n...

This is the first English translation of Michael Chekhov’s two-volume autobiography, combining The Path of the Actor (1927) and extensive extracts from his later volume Life and Encounters.Full of illuminating anecdotes and insightful observations involving prominent characters from the MAT and the European theatre of the early twentieth century, Chekhov takes us through events in his acting career and personal life, from his childhood in St. Petersburg until his ...

An electrifying new side of the National Book Award Winner Yoko Tawada: her first book of essays in EnglishSHORTLISTED FOR THE NBCC AWARD IN CRITICISM AND THE GREGG BARRIOS BOOK IN TRANSLATION PRIZEA New Yorker Best Book of 2025I am trying to learn, with my tongue, sounds that are unfamiliar to me. A foreign-sounding word learned out of curiosity is not “imitation” per se. All of these ...

**“[A] fascinating and accessible account . . . In his entertaining book, Mr. Eilenberger shows that his magicians’ thoughts are still worth collecting, even if, with hindsight, we can see that some performed too many intellectual conjuring tricks.” —Wall Street JournalA grand narrative of the intertwining lives of Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Ernst Cassirer, major philosophers whose ideas shaped the twentieth century**The year is 191...

THE EYES OF THE SKINFirst published in 1996, The Eyes of the Skin has become a classic of architectural theory. It asks the far-reaching question why, when there are five senses, has one single sense – sight – become so predominant in architectural culture and design? With the ascendancy of the digital and the all-pervasive use of the image electronically, it is a subject that has become all the more pressing and topical since the first edition’s publicati...

It has been described as a "tame longing without any particular object" by Schopenhauer, "a bestial and indefinable affliction" by Dostoevsky, and "time's invasion of your world system" by Joseph Brodsky, but still very few of us today can explain precisely what boredom is. A Philosophy of Boredom investigates one of the central preoccupations of our age as it probes the nature of boredom, how it originated, how and why it afflicts us, and why we cannot seem to overcome it by any ...

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was a Russian painter credited as being among the first to truly venture into abstract art. He persisted in expressing his internal world of abstraction despite negative criticism from his peers. He veered away from painting that could be viewed as representational in order to express his emotions, leading to his unique use of colour and form. Although his works received heavy censure at the time, in later years they would become greatly influential.

Tracing the thread of “decreation” in Chinese thought, from constantly changing classical masterpieces to fake cell phones that are better than the original.Shanzhai is a Chinese neologism that means “fake,” originally coined to describe knock-off cell phones marketed under such names as Nokir and Samsing. These cell phones were not crude forgeries but multifunctional, stylish, and as good as or better than the originals. Shanzhai has since spread into oth...

The ability to imagine is at the heart of what makes us human. Through our imagination we experience more fully the world both around us and within us. Imagination plays a key role in creativity and innovation.Until the seventeenth century, the human imagination was celebrated. Since then, with the emergence of science as the dominant worldview, imagination has been marginalised -- depicted as a way of escaping reality, rather than knowing it more profoundly -- and its significance ...

Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), as well as being one of the pioneers of psychology, is one of the most controversial of thinkers: in spite of being largely responsible for the introduction of now-familiar psychological terms such as ‘extrovert’ and ‘introvert’, Jung has often been sidelined, remaining on the fringes of academic discourse. In this new account Paul Bishop reclaims Jung as a major European thinker whose true significance, even now, is not fully appreciated.Taking into a...